Not too long ago Dictionary.com got their own abridged version of the Random House dictionary. Naturally, this became the site's dictionary of choice, and so the American Heritage dictionary (which had been the first entry on that site) slipped to second choice. The new abridged entries are so long that it's hard to even find the good entries underneath them.
The American Heritage is my favorite. I like how concise it is and I think it has the most thorough etymologies and usage notes. When Dictionary.com switched their preferred dictionary, I started looking to switch my preferred Web site.
The end of my search is this: TheFreeDictionary.com. The site can do specialized searches in computing, medical, legal and financial dictionaries, as well as searching sites like Google and Wikipedia. The most important to me, though, is that the regular dictionary entries use the American Heritage dictionary.
I even found a search plugin so that I could replace Dictionary.com in the Mozilla search bar. You can get it here (there are plugins for each of the searches, and the last one that is the plain dictionary search).
No comments:
Post a Comment